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Beatles Collaborator Tony Sheridan Dead at 72

Tony Sheridan, a singer and guitarist who collaborated with The Beatles in the early 1970s, passed away in London at the age of 72. The Beatles met the singer in Hamburg, Germany, where they had been booked to play at the Indra, a club in the city's Red Light District. The raucous, seldom sober Sheridan was the freewheeling American attraction at Hamburg's nearby Top Ten nightclub. The Beatles were so enraptured by Sheridan's performance that they would often go see him at Top Ten after they wrapped up their own show at Indra.

The Beatles ended up sticking around Hamburg, and ultimately, cut some of their earliest records accompanying him then under the shortened moniker, "The Beat Boys." The collection which resulted, entitled Tony Sheridan and The Beatles, was later released outside Germany.

More significantly, however, Sheridan was often credited with introducing the boys from Liverpool to the American R&B sound with his covers of cutting-edge R&B acts like Little Richard. On the fashion side, Sheridan was also renowned for introducing the crew to black leather bomber jackets and cowboy boots, both of which became essential to the Beatles' bad-boy image before they sold out to swooning girls and adopted a cleaner cut suit-and-tie option.